What is Oktay Vural of Tillo trying to do?

The other day a man from among the ulema of Tillo, whom I hold in great respect for his scholarly approach and for his noble stance of attaching no value to the world even though he follows it closely, called me. In a conversation that frankly excited me quite a bit, he conveyed, together with his views and appreciation on the course of the country's affairs, especially on the activities known as the AK Parti's democratic opening, his blessing prayer, and afterwards, hoping that I would voice them in my column, he expressed a reproach and a question. His reproach stemmed from the attitude shown toward these beneficial openings by Mr. Oktay Vural, deputy chairman of the MHP, who is himself a fellow native of Tillo.

"We have difficulty understanding. We are not Kurds, but we are not ethnically Turks either. So on this issue we are in a position to hold the most objective point of view. Oktay Bey is too. We can make no sense of his fanning the flames instead of calming things down more than anyone else. The name Tillo was also changed to Aydınlar without asking anyone, but he too knows very well that, outside the official records, everyone continues to call this place Tillo. The name Tillo has been engraved in history with the lives of thousands of spiritual personalities; those who changed it committed this disrespect recklessly but it was hardly accepted; that someone should try to correct it is in every respect commendable. What is it, I wonder, that pushes Oktay Bey into an attitude in which he will not find support from even one person among the people of Tillo, and which on the contrary disappoints everyone as a fellow native?"

Of course I had no answer I could give to this question. I promised to publish his question in my column, and I received his blessing prayer.

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The name Tillo, just like Norşin, was changed after the eighties in a complete act of official-ideology officiousness. It is a town 6 km from the center of Siirt, famous for the ulema of Tillo, the most important center in the region of a madrasa tradition hundreds of years old that has kept its vitality to the present day, and of course for the names of İbrahim Hakkı, the author of the Marifetname, and his teacher İsmail Fakirullah. The inhabitants of the town are not Kurds but of Arab origin. When it became a district in 1990, its name became Aydınlar.

In fact, it is not at all unheard of for villages and cities to change names as a result of conquests or of the policies of certain periods. Such things happen in every period of history.

Name changes take place in history after periods in which a region has undergone intensive cultural and demographic population change. Even in these cases, even if the old names are preserved, they undergo transformation through the pronunciation of a new language. Like Smyrna becoming İzmir, Ankira becoming Ankara, Istinpolis becoming İstanbul. Here, the conquests are not to make the old name forgotten; when it is transformed entirely through the pronunciation of a new population, it both becomes alien to its own original language and turns into words that have no meaning in the new language. Almost all cities with names of this kind, names that have no meaning, are of this type.

Go over all the cities one by one if you like. You will find meaning in very few of them. Proper names have such a nature anyway. In fact, searching for the Turkish, Kurdish or Armenian of these city names is quite unnecessary. City names, after a point, cease to belong to a language.

Most of the names that are to be returned to their originals today are not Kurdish anyway. But when an attempt is made to change them in the middle of an intense ethnic conflict, these names suddenly become Kurdish.

Norşin and Tillo (inhabited by an Arab population) too, although they are not Kurdish names, become part of the Kurdish question today.

Whatever anyone may say, in the act of ethnic denial based on name changing there is a strange cooperation with the PKK, or a dimension of support to the organization's effort to feed Kurdish nationalism or the human resources in the mountains. For, considering the environment in which it was done, it was impossible not to see that it would have a provocative function.

Moreover, let us remember that in the same period when this operation was being carried out, nationalism in Turkey was stirred by a very strong emotional rancor because Turkish villages and Turkish children in Bulgaria were being given Bulgarian names. The "Bulgarian oppression," whose most important item was "changing village and personal names," was being cursed. Had you let them, many young people were ready to go to the aid of their Turkish brothers subjected to Bulgarian oppression. In Turkey meanwhile, an operation seemingly copied from the Bulgarians was being carried out in the Southeast.

Do you suppose this operation did not whet the appetite of the organization that was expecting militants in the mountains to fight on its side? Whose was the mind that prompted the application in Turkey, at the same time, of the very treatment that made the Turk rebel against the state in Bulgaria?

Could PKK have been given better support than this?

And who is uneasy today about the withdrawal of this support, and why?

Is it not worth asking?